Degenerated workers' state

In Trotskyist political theory, a degenerated workers' state is a socialist state in which direct working class control of production has given way to control by a bureaucratic clique. The term was developed by Leon Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed and in other works.

Trotsky held that in Russia between the 1917 October Revolution and up to Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power, there was a genuine workers' state. The bourgeoisie had been politically overthrown by the working class and the economic basis of that state lay in collective ownership of the means of production. Contrary to the predictions of many socialists such as Lenin, the revolution failed to spread to Germany and other industrial Western European countries (although there were massive upheavals of working people in some of these countries), and consequently the Soviet state began to degenerate. This was worsened by the material and political degeneration of the Russian working class by the Civil War of 1917–1923.

After the death of Lenin in 1924, the ruling stratum of the Soviet Union, consolidated around Stalin, was held to be a bureaucratic caste, and not a new ruling class, because its political control did not also extend to economic ownership. The theory that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers' state is closely connected to Trotsky's call for a political revolution in the USSR, as well as Trotsky's call for defense of the USSR against capitalist restoration.

Trotsky summarized the more optimistic arguments within the International Left Opposition thus:

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